Something to get excited about
I've been thinking for a little while about starting a photo blog. I wasn't sure if I wanted to do it, and did a "soft" version by posting photos to this blog using the #photography tag. I haven't posted very many photos, but there are a handful there mixed in with posts about photography in general. Then last week I thought about starting one up using an 11ty template. I found a few, and tried them out on the weekend.
I ran into the same pitfalls as I have before when trying an 11ty template - I can't get them to work just right. I think the only success I've gotten with a template has been the base blog that I used for my now-rarely-touched video game blog. For my personal website, I think I followed 11ty's guide to get started and went from there making various edits, adding various modules to allow me to make things look the way I want.
For the photo blog, I wanted something simple, something plug-and-play that I didn't have to work too hard to get off the ground. As I mentiond though, I had issues with the templates I found. I couldn't get them to work properly for one, and for two, I wanted to put this on github and deploy to Netlify (as I do with https://srgower.com). When you use a template, and clone the repository to your own, you have to create a fork. For whatever reason I don't like the idea of this and quickly deleted these repositories.
Oh - maybe I should specify what doesn't work for me with templates. The people creating them include good instructions for how to set them up, but they have a very specific workflow and it's not always clear what fields you need to edit. And when I did edit them, it didn't always work. For one blog template I tried replacing some photo posts with my own and...they didn't work? I couldn't figure out why so I just ditched the template. The other thing - the people making these templates have organized things in a way that makes sense to them, but I can't always figure out where things are to change them to customize to my own liking.
So, that's why I decided to build from scratch. This time though I used a guide I had bookmarked in the past from fLamed Fury. This guide - while technically out of date according to Flamed - walks you through the process of setting it up using HTML and setting things up one step at a time. This method of setting things up worked perfectly for me. I only set up the files I figured that I needed - I can always go back in and create more things as-needed.
What I appreciate about this guide is that it doesn't bother with various add-on modules - it's strictly the basics, using what 11ty gives you out of the box. There's no markdown (you have to add markdown-It if you want to use markdown), which is fine; I think using HTML is fine. For the most part the photo links I want to use rely on HTML anyway. And I think this makes styling a little easier, to be honest. As far as installing 11ty modules goes, I'm only going to install what I need, as I go. I know I will need to add RSS to the mix so I can create a feed for the blog, but I haven't gotten that far yet.
But as an example of adding things as I go - Fury's guide only covers basic frontmatter data, such as title & tags. I want to include more information for RSS information - such as the date, meta_description, meta_image, etc. All of that stuff I will need to add when I'm ready to create the feed.xml file, so having it in my frontmatter data now will be helpful for me down the road. In particular though, I wanted the date field so that I could display the date on the blog posts. Once I had that I could display it using {{ date }} - but the problem resulted in a barely readable date format. So I went searching for how to fix that, and implemented the fix in eleventy.js. Problem solved, the date shows in a more reader-friendly view.
Basically I'm trying to avoid cluttering up the page adding things I might need down the road, opting instead for things I need right now and things I know for sure I will need.
One of the most fun things I've done is create a changelog. It's helping me keep tabs on what I've done so far, and I added a roadmap for what I want to change or add down the road. It's been fun.
If you want to check out my progress, the URL is https://photos.srgower.com/ - be sure to check out the changelog, I'm proud of that. I'm not quite ready to "release" the blog into the wild just yet - and by that I just mean creating an RSS feed for it. I think the only reason for that is that there are a few kinks I want to make sure are worked out, and that I have all the frontmatter data I want in place, and that I exclude certain things from the feed when I publish it. For example, I don't want the "next / previous" links showing in RSS feeds. Even though context is provided (the links display the title of the next or previous posts), the links would just open in a new tab in a feed reader, and are only really important for people browsing on the website.
I did a ton of work on the website in the last half week so I'm going to let it simmer for a little bit before coming back to it. But it's been fun to have something to be excited about that takes my attention away from writing in general. It's coming together a LOT faster than I thought it would, I think because of my previous experience setting up a website from scratch the first time.
Let me know what you think of the project!
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